For the better part of two months, every conversation we've had with members about the spot market has started the same way: it keeps getting worse. This week, for the first time since March, several of you told us something different. Block and barrel cheese prices have been climbing, not falling, and the shift has been sharp enough that more than one member described it as disorienting after so many weeks of bad news.
The turn doesn't erase what's happened. Milk was still being dumped in some regions as recently as a few weeks ago, with processors asking farms to cut production because there was nowhere for the extra volume to go. Some of that slack is easing as federal purchasing programs have started pulling product off the market and reopening food-service channels have begun to reorder, even cautiously. Neither of those things fixes the underlying problem overnight, but together they've been enough to put a floor under prices that looked, in April, like they didn't have one.
Why we're not calling it a recovery yet
A rally this fast, after a collapse this deep, is exactly the kind of move that makes forecasting difficult. Futures markets have been volatile day to day, and several members who sell on contract told us their buyers are still hedging conservatively, unwilling to commit to volumes further out than a few weeks. That's a reasonable posture given how much of the "reopening" happening across the country right now is partial — dining rooms operating at a fraction of capacity, some grocery categories still soft, some states barely open at all. A price rally built on that kind of foundation can reverse as easily as it arrived.
There's also a split worth naming plainly: the retail case and the food-service case are not recovering at the same pace, or for the same reasons. Retail cheese sales have held up reasonably well since March, in some cases better than usual, as households cook more at home. Food service is a longer climb back, and the members who sell primarily into restaurants and hospitality accounts are still working with a smaller, more uncertain order book than the ones selling mostly retail. If your business leans food-service, this rally may not feel like much of one yet.
What we'd suggest doing with this information
Don't restructure your pricing or production plans around one good stretch of weeks. If you've been holding back on decisions you had to make regardless — a contract renewal, a hiring call, a decision about whether to keep running reduced shifts — this is a reasonable moment to revisit them with slightly better information than you had a month ago, but not a reason to assume the worst is fully behind us.
We'll keep tracking the spot market and sharing what we're hearing from members who sell into both channels. If your own experience this month doesn't match what we've described here, we'd genuinely like to hear about it — the more data points we have from members directly, the better a picture we can give everyone else.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.